The Artist and Me

by Kay, Hannah;

  Table of Contents

  Legal Page

  Title Page

  Book Description

  Dedication

  Trademarks Acknowledgement

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  New Excerpt

  About the Author

  Publisher Page

  The Artist and Me

  ISBN # 978-1-78430-758-5

  ©Copyright Hannah Kay 2016

  Cover Art by Posh Gosh ©Copyright April 2016

  Edited by Jamie D. Rose

  Finch Books

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, places and events are from the author’s imagination and should not be confused with fact. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, events or places is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form, whether by printing, photocopying, scanning or otherwise without the written permission of the publisher, Finch Books.

  Applications should be addressed in the first instance, in writing, to Finch Books. Unauthorised or restricted acts in relation to this publication may result in civil proceedings and/or criminal prosecution.

  The author and illustrator have asserted their respective rights under the Copyright Designs and Patents Acts 1988 (as amended) to be identified as the author of this book and illustrator of the artwork.

  Published in 2016 by Finch Books, Newland House, The Point, Weaver Road, Lincoln, LN6 3QN

  Finch Books is a subsidiary of Totally Entwined Group Limited.

  THE ARTIST AND ME

  Hannah Kay

  Like the colorful strokes of her brush, love changes the canvas of their lives.

  Lucas is just a small town writer starting a summer internship at the local paper when Julie blows into town like a cyclone. Legs a mile long, ginger hair that curls delicately to the small of her back and a smile that could generate enough energy to power Carltonville for months on end, she is easily a knockout. Unlike the other girls at the high school, though, she simply is what she is—beautiful, smart, confident and an artist to her core—all facts that cause the girls to hate her and the guys to want her.

  By some stroke of luck—or so he feels—she is choosing to give Lucas, the quiet writer guy, a chance. It doesn’t add up, but Lucas isn’t going to dispute it. He just prays to the great God in Heaven that he doesn’t screw it up.

  The writer and the artist—pen and paint. Is this story a masterpiece that will stand the test of time or will it fade with the summer sun?

  Dedication

  To my family—my mama, Amy Kay, my sister, Lilliana Kay, and my granny, Kay Karen—who put up with the insane ramblings of a teenage girl and helped them become a book.

  Trademarks Acknowledgement

  The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of the following wordmarks mentioned in this work of fiction:

  New York Times: The New York Times Company

  Boston Globe: Boston Globe Media Partners LLC

  Ford: Ford Motor Company.

  Washington Post: The Washington Post

  Volvo: Volvo Trademark Holding AB Corporation

  Romeo and Juliet: William Shakespeare

  Disney: Disney Enterprises Inc.

  Charlie Brown: Charles M. Schulz

  Polo: Ralph Lauren

  Sprite: Coca-Cola Corporation

  Diet Coke: Coca-Cola Corporation

  Coke: Coca-Cola Corporation

  CliffsNotes: Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt

  Friends: Warner Brothers Television

  Trix: General Mills

  ChapStick: Wyeth Corporation

  Dr. Pepper: Dr. Pepper/Seven-Up Inc.

  Amazon: Amazon Technologies Inc.

  Aragog: J.K. Rowling

  Jedi: LucasFilm Entertainment Company

  Lightsaber: LucasFilm Entertainment Company

  Julius Caesar: William Shakespeare

  Walmart: Walmart Stores Inc.

  McDonald’s: McDonald’s Corporation

  Wendy’s: Oldemark LLC

  Big Mac: McDonald’s Corporation

  Post-it: 3M Company Corporation

  Narnia: CS Lewis

  Nerds: The Willy Wonka Candy Company

  Laffy Taffy: The Willy Wonka Candy Company

  Girl Scouts: Girl Scouts of America

  Styrofoam: The Dow Chemical Company Corporation

  Chapter One

  Lucas

  “Lucas!” A firm hand rapped against my door and I growled, rolling over in bed to peer at the alarm clock poised atop my ever-growing stack of books ‘to read’.

  It was seven-forty-five on Tuesday morning. Tuesday, May twenty-third, to be exact. Today I would begin my internship with Alexander Swift, proprietor and, for all intents and purposes, editor of the Carltonville Gazette. It wasn’t the New York Times, The Boston Globe or anything of the sort, but it was a real news office and it would most certainly be a step up from the Eagle Newsletter at school, where Sally Rainwater was editor only because she’d been the most popular person in the room on a random Thursday during assembly.

  About twenty minutes later I arrived in the kitchen, freshly showered and wearing black slacks and a blue button-down shirt. Mom was setting loaded plates out on the table—four bright yellow plates to match the sunshine streaming through the open windows. My mom, wearing a pair of jeans and a simple black T-shirt covered with a tattered apron, loved sunshine. She was a kindergarten teacher during the school year, the perfect career for her demeanor.

  My father was bent over the newspaper, but don’t be fooled. He wasn’t scanning its contents for new writing techniques or anything remotely creative. He was checking for stocks—reported straight from the Big Apple. The collar of his white starched shirt stuck up in the back. Classic Dad, the ever distracted businessman.

  Clara, my younger sister by a year, was reclining in her chair and wearing a thin green T-shirt over her—surely—skimpy bikini to prevent Dad’s annual freak-out over her choice of swimwear. Did I mention that for most of Carltonville High’s student body, today was just the first day of summer vacation?

  Clara rejected the plate Mom placed in front of her, instead plucking an apple from the bowl in the center of the table. “Alyssa is picking me up in five.” She took a bite.

  Dad’s ears perked up. “Going out to the beach?” He didn’t wait for a response. “Who’s going?”

  The inquiry went on as I ate my eggs, toast and bacon, the same inquisition that occurred every first day of summer. Dad dug around for information and Clara skirted around the truth. It was the same result. Dad, charmed by his baby girl, believed Clara and her two best friends were going to the beach sans boys to soak up some sun on the first day of summer when in actuality it would be Clara, her two best friends, plus practically the entire student body of Carltonville High—boys included—as it had been since Clara was thirteen.

  She stood at the beep of Alyssa’s horn and pecked Dad’s cheek for good measure, grabbing her bag from where it’d been tucked under her chair and bouncing out of the front door without another word.

  My mom, completely aware of Clara’s real plans, bit her toast carefully,
checking her watch. “You’d better head out too, Lucas. Don’t want to be late on your first day.”

  With that, Mom bought me time to run by and grab some coffee, something she and I had in common. I was about as far from a teacher as you could get, but I could put away a cup of coffee in under three minutes on our ‘commute’ to school—the high and elementary schools of Carltonville were basically the same entity. In fact, the idea of a ‘middle school’ had been eradicated from our schools long ago. Needless to say, my dad detested coffee so much that he banned it from his house. He was definitely the stricter of our parents, the iron fist to mom’s soft lilac.

  I climbed in the front seat of Hendleson, my beat-up black Ford, and slammed the door behind me—not out of anger. It jams easily. My grandfather bought Hendleson on March twenty-seventh, 1972—also known as the day my dad was born. Granddad drove that truck until my dad went off to college and he passed it on. My dad was never very fond of Hendleson, though, so the second he raised enough money to buy a car, Hendleson took up a dusty corner of the garage until I got the keys on my sixteenth birthday. Unlike Dad, I loved that piece of scrap metal.

  I traveled down Elm to the Square—epicenter of social life in Carltonville—separating residential from business. The Square was marked by the one stoplight in town and two businesses. The Corner Store served as the grocery store and gas station in one pit stop. Across the road, there was the Diner, so simply named by Randy Drake, also known between my mom and me as ‘the man with the goods’.

  Hendleson jerked forward when the light flipped from red to green and I pulled into the parking lot of the Diner. The faded yellow lines against the gray pavement were a secret covenant, laughter and memories textured with age.

  I hopped from the truck, heaving the door shut again, stuffing my keys into my pants pocket and forging inside. The Diner was your classic diner-style—red vinyl booths and high stools at the counter. Randy was at the cash register as always, gray hair sticking out to one side and blue eyes inviting. He grinned, grabbing a to-go cup and filling it with coffee without waiting for my order. He didn’t need it. By the time I stepped up to the counter, he had it all ready. “One cup of joe for Mr. Lucas Elliot.”

  “Ay, Lou!” I heard Mike’s voice from across the room and chuckled to myself.

  “Thanks, Randy,” I told him, handing him a wrinkled dollar from my pocket and fishing around for a quarter. I passed it to him and he smiled the way only an old man that’d watched you grow up could.

  “Good luck today,” he offered as I left, and I just smiled. I wasn’t surprised he knew about the internship. My mom had told everyone she saw for the past two months. I’m not sure why, though. It wasn’t like there was a long line of Carltonville students gunning for an internship at our hole-in-the-wall newspaper.

  I rounded the corner to find Mike sharing a booth with Krista, his on-and-off-again girlfriend of two years. Correction, a year and nine months. Mike and I had been friends as long as I could remember. Our moms worked together at the elementary school so as kids we were pulled together by circumstance and friendship took hold. His dusty blond hair and haunting hazel eyes were what I most associated with an overpowering feeling of home that could only be born of PB&Js at midnight, blanket forts built in living rooms and too many video games.

  “Hey, man,” I greeted, smiling.

  “Hey, Lucas.” He grinned back and took a big bite from one of the donuts piled high on the plate in front of them.

  Krista grinned at him, tossing her golden, pin-straight hair across her tiny shoulders. “Excited for your first day, Lucas?” Krista had always been too nice to be top of the cheerleading pyramid.

  I nodded, chancing a glance at my watch. “Very… Actually, I’d better run so I won’t be late.” I smiled one last time at them. “I’ll see you guys tonight at the barbeque.” Every year on the first day of summer, Carltonville gathered for a town cook-out. Mayor Hightower cooked hot dogs and hamburgers, and the rest was potluck. Mama always took her special brownies. Don’t get too excited. The ‘special’ ingredient is hot fudge. She calls them that to get a rise out of the teenagers that actually show up.

  “See ya,” they called before dissolving into each other again. Part of me wondered why they weren’t steadier. They seemed so solid.

  I put the insulated coffee cup in Hendleson’s cup holder and pulled from the parking lot back onto Elm once again, driving now toward the business end of town. The post office, the two-floor hospital where you went for everything—even your school checkups, because we didn’t have a doctor’s office—then finally the newspaper office. Elm bottomed out at the school, but I turned into the small parking lot in front of the flat building marked with thick letters reading Carltonville Gazette. There were only three cars in the lot but I parked Hendleson smoothly a few places down out of respect before disembarking, coffee in hand. I crossed the parking lot and stepped inside.

  My eyes swept across the room, assessing. The entire room was gray and tan and some muted shade of off-white from the cubicles to the water cooler to the near-dead potted plant against the wall.

  I sighed. Let day one begin.

  * * * *

  So far it had been numbing. Men and women I’d known from church all my life filtered in with little enthusiasm to slump in their chairs and type in their respective cubicles.

  I’d been filing for an hour and twenty-two minutes when it happened. The doors opened and she walked in.

  Color suddenly filled my senses, savory and sweet. Breathing wasn’t an option. All thought of oxygen was lost when she stepped inside, radiant as the sun, then when she slammed into Mr. Swift’s office, it was over. My breath came in a rush. Light and color drained from the room once again.

  Legs a mile long, ginger hair that curled delicately to the small of her back and a smile that could generate enough energy to power Carltonville for months on end, she was easily ‘a knockout’. She was beautiful.

  Those words felt like an understatement, failing to capture the radiance that was this mysterious girl. She was wearing a bright blue trench coat, only this one wasn’t the kind like sleazy men in the movies wore. Instead, it was pulled in at her petite waist with a wide belt that tied around her middle in a bow before flaring from there to just above her knees.

  When I came back down to earth, I was startled by the fact that it was the heat of summer and this girl looked, if not straight off a movie set in Los Angeles, straight off the high fashion streets of New York City. I didn’t have long to dwell on that, because the door swung open again and she strutted from the office like she owned the place.

  * * * *

  Hendleson heaved into the packed parking lot on the beach and I sat behind the wheel, staring out across the soft white sand. Kids were running like nothing could catch them, making sandcastles, grinning and giggling and playing come-and-get-me games of tag. Teenagers were huddled up the beach in their respective cliques, most of the girls reclined back on beach towels trying to savor the last rays of the dying sun while the boys threw around a nearly deflated football, kicking up sand. The adults were up beach, standing idly by the tables of food and chatting among themselves.

  My eyes merely scanned past all of that. I was peering through the crowd, searching for any sign of that blue coat. It would be unmistakable in this crowd dressed in a splattering of swimming suits, tees and short shorts—or that gorgeous ginger hair. She’d captivated my attention in five minutes. At first look, actually.

  ’Course I knew the second any of the guys saw her, that’d be it. I couldn’t compete with the jocks that’d crowd her. I wouldn’t be surprised if the cheerleaders didn’t recruit her for their summer training program. She was that kind of beautiful.

  There was a knock on Hendleson’s window and I abandoned my search for the girl, dragging my eyes to find Mike, backed up by the Goodman twins. I shut Hendleson’s engine off and pushed the door open, cocking my head to the side at their almost urgent expressions.
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  “Have you seen her?” Mike urged, searching my expression for a response.

  “Who?” As if I didn’t know.

  Adam piped up, “Alexander Swift’s daughter.”

  “Frank saw her and just about had a heart attack,” Avery added, nodding.

  Their identical heads bobbed in eerie unison of blond and blue and I knew I was sunk. Alexander Swift’s daughter. How hadn’t I thought of that? Now it seemed painfully obvious.

  “She’s here?” I found myself asking, looking up from my dazed thoughts.

  Mike shook his head. “I haven’t seen her—”

  “Aw, man, she’s gorgeous.” Avery was a raving lunatic. “Those legs, I mean—”

  I wasn’t going to listen to their animalistic description of her. She didn’t really seem like the girl who’d want to be mentally groped by the whole male population of Carltonville.

  I forged forward with them, trying to ignore the fact that all three of them had girlfriends. Trying not to picture Krista’s face if she heard Mike talking like this. Trying not to think about the fact that this could crack the fragile balance of their relationship. Trying not to think about how I actually liked Krista. I mean, as my best friend’s girl. She was pleasant to be around and they fit well together… Well, most of the time.

  “Earth to Lucas!” Mike was waving his hand in front of my face.

  I chuckled. “What?”

  “Where’d you go, dude?”

  I shrugged.

  “Hey, you’re already working this summer. You can’t start going AWOL on us when you’re actually around.” It was a joke. I think.

  A quick glance—the other two were gone. I forced a chuckle. “Sorry, man.”

  He grinned. “It’s all right. So how’d it go?”